Old review – life’s a beach in M. Night Shyamalan’s brilliantly pulpy horror

Getting older is a part of life we tend to push to the back of our minds. Who, after all, wants to spend precious time pondering their own inevitable non-existence? M. Night Shyamalan's latest horror-thriller, Old, a ridiculous but thoroughly entertaining Twilight Zone-like yarn that could not be accused of wasting its batshit crazy premise, sets out to grapple with the subject of mortality using what is arguably the most M. Night Shyamalan-like plot device imaginable: a haunted beach.

It's often said that Shyamalan is a very good director, but not a very good writer. That his films depend entirely on the viewer's willingness to overlook the clunkier storytelling aspects. Much of Shyamalan's career has been defined by the idea of him as a “one-trick pony,” with films built on increasingly ridiculous and groan-inducing twists. For a while, his name became synonymous with that of a hack who'd failed to live up to his potential. In retrospect, it seems like a harsh and unfair way to approach a body of work that, for the most part, is a lot of fun.

Old is a lot of fun, too. It's also textbook Shyamalan in all the ways that will be sure to please his fans and irritate his detractors. The premise is simple: Prisca (Vicky Kreips, in an all-time bad performance), husband Guy (Gael Garciá Bernal), and their two young kids, arrive at an idyllic tropical resort during a point of crisis in their marriage. After checking in (and wondering how they scored such a good deal), the hotel manager tells them about a secluded beach that only a few “special guests” are invited to. Of course, they're eager to visit.

When they arrive at this sun-kissed stretch of water, though – joined by a cast of assorted characters/fodder played by Rufus Sewell, Kathleen Chalfant, Abby Lee, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Ken Leung – they discover that they're unable to leave. But that's not the worst of it: it doesn't take long before the group realise, for reasons that can't be explained, that they're ageing at a rapid rate. In this increasingly ominous cove, a few hours is the equivalent of several years. Swimsuits are suddenly too tight. A washed-up corpse quickly becomes a skeleton. Grandma isn't breathing. Kids are now horny teenagers.

Watching this 13th Shyamalan film, there is no doubt that it has been directed. Say what you will about Shyamalan, but in an era rife with anonymous blockbusters, his level of craftsmanship is undeniable – and infectious. A student of the Hitchcock school of filmmaking, he's constantly shown himself to be an expert at blocking and staging. His early films – The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs – showcased a Spielberg-like ability to place the camera in the perfect position, every tracking shot or close-up thoughtfully considered in order to deliver the maximum amount of fear or awe.

In Old, the camera can't keep still: every shot is doing something unusual, to the point it's impossible not to take notice. You might call it over-directed, if this weren't a film about a haunted beach where the usual rules of time and space have floated out to sea. Instead, it feels like the filmmaker has carefully thought about every shot in relation to his concept: as to exemplify the rapid ageing, characters always appear to be bursting out of the frame. Elsewhere, the camera circles the cast in a series of dizzying and complex tracking shots, forcing us to search their faces for some new wrinkle or grey hair.

The idea at the core of Old is inherently terrifying, of course, because we live in a world defined by our sense that time is moving at a (mostly) manageable pace. But what do you do when you've just seen your child go from age six to age sixteen in a couple of hours? How do you work out what should have been years of feelings for a person in less than a day? Shyamalan doesn't exactly slow down to battle the existential weight of these questions – the film is too busy finding the next incident for that – but he creates such a palpable sense of chaos and confusion that we can't help but rethink our own relationship with time.

This is intentionally not a very subtle film: right from minute one, as Guy reprimands his wife for looking at her phone when she should be appreciating the scenery, the message is obvious: we're not here for very long. Blink and you'll miss life's precious moments. To this end, the filmmaker piles on the foreshadowing to an absurdly comical degree, mainly through clunky dialogue cues (“You're always thinking about the past!”). Is it good writing? No. Does it arguably make a movie about a crazy beach a lot more entertaining? Sure! Does the director know what he's doing? It's no coincidence that Shyamalan casts himself as the person responsible for bringing these characters to the beach  – if that isn't self-aware, what is?

Old thrives on a combination of fast pacing and intriguing set-pieces, most of them grotesque and frightening, and one – set in a claustrophobic cave, complete with the twistiest limbs you've ever seen – with more than a hint of J-horror. The atmosphere of dread is deeply felt throughout because… well, every few minutes we're able to experience some new consequence of the characters' not having acted in time. Shyamalan clearly had a blast thinking about the physical possibilities that go with this territory (an early surgery scene is especially gag-inducing, while an accelerated pregnancy is genuinely disturbing), even if the film never quite arrives at anywhere particularly profound, and the characters themselves never amount to more than mere vessels for the concept (kudos to Alex Wolff, Eliza Scanlen, and Thomasin McKenzie, however, who channel “children forced into adult bodies way before their time” to an impressive degree).

The director can't help but fall into a few of the same traps that scarred some of his more maligned works – in this way, Old shares some of its DNA with The Happening (a fun movie, admittedly, that simply tries way too hard to justify itself). There's a clawing sense of the director forcing his characters to explain everything when honing in on their shocked faces might have told the same story. And where this might have been an opportunity to create something more ambiguous and metaphorical, Shyamalan's instincts steer him in the other direction. There's a “twist,” but not really; it's more of a conventional reveal than something that completely upturns our idea of what has come before.

Old is no masterpiece – whether it ages as well as some of Shyamalan's other works remains to be seen – but it is thoroughly entertaining, playful, unpretentious, and sincere, further proof of this director's standing as one of the most undervalued blockbuster filmmakers of the 21st century. At a point where many seem to be realising the value of an artist like Shyamalan, one of the last of his kind, Old stands as a testament to his unique ability to elevate the pulpiest material – a gifted craftsman who just happens to favour schlock of the highest order. Personally, I wouldn't want him any other way.

Old is now showing in UK cinemas.